Creationism - National Center for Science Education

Vail’s Canopy Theory was soon adopted by the Jehovah’s Witnesses and other
creationists. Modern strict creationists have made the canopy theory a central feature of
their creation-science, though they have completely jettisoned all the developmental,
“evolutionist” aspects of Vail’s original conception. They hold that the Canopy was
created directly by God. Following Vail, they use it to explain all the unusual features of
the pre-Flood earth: the fabulous longevity of the patriarchs (largely due to increased
oxygen pressure and shielding from deleterious cosmic radiation), the exotic
meteorological and climatic conditions of Eden, which were the result of a strong
greenhouse effect which produced a uniform semi-tropical climate over the globe with an
absence of seasonal changes, storms and other modern weather disturbances—and even
the absence of rainbows until after the Flood.
The canopy theory has been extended to “scientifically” explain even the most
obscure biblical descriptions of antediluvian conditions. Creationist advocates very
quickly produced competing variants, however. Some insist, by means of scientific
arguments, that the canopy must have been composed of water in vapor form, while
others have produced scientific arguments to show that it consisted of liquid water, and
others have proposed models of ice canopies.
Creationist theorists are faced with the dilemma of distorting either science to
make it fit the Bible, or their interpretation of the Bible to make it fit standard science.
Additional, extra-biblical creations have been proposed by some creationist theorists in
the attempt to devise a “scientific” creationism. Pointing to the similarity of organisms
on different continents separated by whole oceans, Dudley Whitney argued that this
refuted evolution, since the continents could not have moved (this was before the
acceptance of continental drift). Whitney proposed that these similar forms were placed
on other continents separately in a second creation following the Flood—“a very
reasonable supposition provided the concept of creation can be allowed.”
...if God created this world and the plants and animals upon it in the first place, He could replace destroyed
plants and animals by a second creation, and the logical belief is that He did so, to some extent at least.
(1961:35, 36]
Walter Galusha modified the Gap Theory to include a third creation, between the initial
creation and the Adamic creation. This added creation included the cave-men found as
fossils.
Harold Clark, attempting to correct some obvious scientific deficiencies of his
mentor Price’s Flood Geology, suggested, in his “ecological zonation theory,” that the
order of the geological strata was not entirely arbitrary, as Price had insisted. Bernard
Northrup has strongly critized Morris’s Flood Geology as scientifically inadequate, and
has hypothesized that there were multiple catastrophes in earth history, including
considerable post-Flood geological activity. Glenn Morton likewise rejects Flood
Geology and strict young-earth creationism, using an expanding earth model to
scientifically account for the Genesis descriptions. The expanding earth hypothesis is
also used by other creationists (including some at ICR) as an alternative to continental
drift, though traditional Flood Geologists rely on the massive geophysical changes
brought about by the Flood to account for the current makeup and distribution of
continents. (All such creationist hypotheses must account for the “division of the earth
[or land]” alluded to in Genesis “in the days of Peleg” shortly after the Flood.) Thomas